This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Destroy the village to save it. That was the American logic during the Vietnam War in burning My Lai and massacring 400 women and children.

Kill 100,000 jobs in the public sector to create 1 million new jobs. That’s Tim Hudak’s plan to save the Ontario economy.

It has been dismissed by respected economists as “bogus,” “an absolute disaster” and “utter nonsense.” They say that Hudak and the right-wing American economists who advised him have got their math all wrong. That gutting the public service by 10 per cent might take more money out of the system than his proposed 3.5 per cent corporate tax cuts would put in. That his tax cut would, at best, create 20,000 jobs, not 120,000 — assuming that his assumptions are correct, which they are not.

Corporations pocket the tax cuts rather than invest in job creation, a habit they’ve been pilloried for by the Bank of Canada. If lower taxation does create jobs, Ontario would be awash in them since it already is among the lowest corporate tax jurisdictions. If “a permanent reduction in taxes creates permanent jobs,” as Hudak believes, he should, logically, be advocating eliminating corporate income tax altogether.

The damage from slashing the public sector would be unevenly distributed, given that Hudak would exempt doctors, nurses and cops from cuts. That would mean disproportionate cuts elsewhere in health, social services and government services. His plan to fire teachers would repeat the Mike Harris war on the profession. His education cutbacks “would lead to the devastation of post-secondary funding,” according to the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations. His plan to do away with a third of regulations on businesses, and abolishing the College of Trades, would lower standards and consumer protection.

Article Continued Below

(His is a more radical approach than the one taken by the Stephen Harper Conservatives, who, for example, have been, rightly, going after bogus immigrant consultants).

Andrea Horwath is the NDP’s Michael Ignatieff. As federal Liberal leader, he kept threatening to topple Harper’s then-minority government even as he kept propping it up. Horwath spent two years threatening to bring down the minority Liberal government, even while supporting Dalton McGuinty and then Kathleen Wynne.

When Horwath finally pulled the plug, she did it over a budget that was tailor-made for the NDP — a provincial pension plan for working folks (something she herself had advocated), higher welfare benefits, better child care benefits, etc.

She is running a populist campaign of clichés that would do proud — slash “waste,” cut consultants’ fee, reduce public sector executive wages, and appoint “a minister for savings,” who would, magically, find $600 million a year. She has little or nothing to say about income inequality, let alone job creation.

She is “running to the right of the Liberals in an attempt to win Conservative votes,” said 34 NDP stalwarts in an open letter of defiance, warning that she may be opening the door to a Hudak government.

She responded that she could “not turn a blind eye to (Liberal) corruption.” But the government is, arguably, less “corrupt” now than it was last year or the year before — if it ever was “corrupt” in the sense most people understand it.

McGuinty had not pocketed any money, nor had any of his ministers, or staff. He cancelled two gas plants for political reasons, to save Liberal seats in Mississauga and Oakville in the last election, at a cost, as it later turned out, of a whopping $1 billion over 20 years. But the NDP and Conservative fulminations sound hypocritical, given they, too, opposed the plants’ locations.

Horwath has failed to provide a credible rationale for causing an election. She simply made a political calculation that the longer Wynne stayed on as premier, the less the chances for the NDP.

That’s a tribute to Ontario’s first woman premier. In her 16 months in office, Wynne has repeatedly apologized for the gas plants, the e-health and ORNGE ambulance fiascos. She reversed several of McGuinty’s ill-conceived or ill-executed policies. Mega casinos gone. Funding found for live horse racing and breeding. Minimum wage increased. Relations with teachers restored. Transportation infrastructure, especially in the GTA, given top priority. The Legislature returned to near-civility.

Those who argue that Wynne must be punished for the sins of McGuinty should also be ruling out Hudak because of Harris and Horwath because of Bob Rae.

Wynne has attempted a balance between fiscal prudence and providing stimulus to an economy that’s still recovering from the effects of globalization and a yet-to-recover American economy. With manufacturing denuded and most of the Western world groping in this post-industrial era, there is no quick fix.

The deficit of $12.5 billion and debt of $300 billion is not the scandal that Hudak makes it out to be. Even Harper bowed to the need for deficit financing following the 2008 global economic meltdown.

Wynne has demonstrated a solid command of public policy, including the agriculture portfolio that she took on. Her experience of running the ministries of Education, Transportation, Municipal Affairs, Housing and Aboriginal Affairs proved an asset in making her a confident premier.

No scandal has ever touched her.

Her honesty and personal integrity were exemplified by how open she has been about her homosexuality and how remarkably she kept her family intact with her partner as well as her former husband and their children.

Those who reject homosexuality, for religious or other reasons, have a right to their views. But the same secular, democratic polity that guarantees them that right also confers on others the right to choose their sexuality. That Wynne’s private life is a non-issue in this campaign is a tribute to Canada’s collective values and wisdom.

Wynne is not artificial, the way too many politicians become. She listens to others and is respectful of her adversaries. Her lifelong belief in trying to right the wrongs done to our aboriginal peoples is genuine, as is her commitment to integrate new immigrants into the Canadian family.

Given her personal and political qualities, Kathleen Wynne is the best choice for premier.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com